![]() ![]() As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. “When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost,” the original patent asserted sweepingly-seemingly oblivious of great swathes of musical history, from jazz and blues to rock, reggae, and rap, where “wrong” has become a new right, where transgressions of tone and timbre and pitch have expressed the cloudy complexity of emotion in abrasively new ways. The expressed goal of Antares at that time was to fix discrepancies of pitch in order to make songs more effectively expressive. Hildebrand realized that the same math that he’d used to map the geological subsurface could be applied to pitch-correction. ![]() The seed of the technology that would make Hildebrand famous came during a lunch with colleagues in the field: When he asked the assembled company what needed to be invented, someone jokingly suggested a machine that would enable her to sing in tune. In 1989, he left behind the lucrative field of “reflection seismology” to launch Antares Audio Technology, despite not being entirely certain what exactly the company would be researching and developing. Alongside math, though, Hildebrand’s other passion was music he’s an accomplished flute player who funded his college tuition by teaching the instrument. Using fabulously complex algorithms to interpret the data generated by sonar, his company located likely deposits of fuel deep underground. ![]() Andy Hildebrand made his first fortune helping the oil giant Exxon find drilling sites. Long before inventing Auto-Tune, the mathematician Dr. Antares Audio Technology marketing slogan ![]()
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